Issue > Poetry

D. E. Steward

D.E. Steward is a literary magazine writer with prose pieces of various stripes in magazines like Massachusetts Review, Conjunctions, Antioch Review, Iowa Review, Northwest Review, AGNI, Fiction International, North American Review and Denver Quarterly. Since 1986, he has been writing serial month-to-month “months.” Well over 200 of the total 349 have been published in literary magazines.

Faaa

Gold Tahitian mangos with their tight-skin Sam Francis blush
Number One Yankee fore and mizzen staysails main unreefed
Two hundred-fifty nautical from all jet trails seven miles high
With the Marianas Trench the equal depth as regularly we fly
Open-ocean nights locked on the Southern Cross and the four
Zenith stars with the procession of Atria Acrux Alpha Centauri
Beta Centauri Avoir Gacrux Achernar Canopus and Al Na'ir
The horizon is three to four miles off from a sailboat's deck
Sun through a shower is a monkey's wedding faces upturned
Fairy terns teeming in the ironwood trees behind Papeete
In the evening calm off Faaa as we crossed hanging close in
Twelve Tahitian women six to a canoe paddles poised waited
And held our gaping stares level and they all laughed at once
So what Fletcher Christian knew two tropic centuries ago
That open sex that drew Melville here and captured Gauguin
That instant was our latitude no longitudinal zenith stars
Necessary with Gienah Zubenelgenubi Sabnik aloft behind